TOPIC: "Magical Fire" - Can we do better?

Mild spoilers for E3 Infernal Redoubt below.


In E3 there is an enemy who flings lava at the party, causing the whole party to take damage. When playing on nightmare the damage type was "magical fire" that could not be resisted with fire damage reduction.

Please, please, please! Do not turn off my tokens as I move up in difficulty - doing so gives the exact opposite incentive you want to be giving!

I understand what is trying to be accomplish with unresistable damage, but this is just frustrating.

A suggestion:

If TD wants to design monsters who do AOE damage that can't be resisted on Nightmare, please consider these alternatives:

1. Assume everyone has 5 DR of the type dealt, and just add 5 more the damage. Yes - some people will resist more, and some less. Oh well - it's nightmare.

2. Split the damage into two types - at most one of which is elemental - it's much less likely someone has big resistances on both. Instead of doing 6 "magical fire" do 3 fire and 3 force (or maybe even 4 and 4).

3. Make it Eldritch or Force - this still makes my tokens irrelevant, but doesn't do so in as much of a frustrating way.


I had a run of fairly new players go through with Figurine of Power: Salamander, Lamp of the Marid, and Bead of Firehold - prepped specifically for fire because of the module name. You know what they learned from this experience? There isn't a point in buying or equipping DR tokens because they don't work.

By my last run on Saturday it was turned into Magical Eldritch Fire.


Rather well said and I can get behind some of your proposed solutions.

I think we were on the same run Justice. And yea, I heard it called "eldritch fire" damage. And when someone said "why even bother saying its fire damage then?" the room DM responded that while the damage was unresistable, because the damage was fire damage the Lamp could heal you afterwards.

Milambus (Jake) wrote: I think we were on the same run Justice. And yea, I heard it called "eldritch fire" damage. And when someone said "why even bother saying its fire damage then?" the room DM responded that while the damage was unresistable, because the damage was fire damage the Lamp could heal you afterwards.

Lol - wish we got that memo...

Hmm I did hear "Magical Fire" too but I assumed Fire reduction still counted. The tokens say "-X Fire", NOT "-X Non-Magical Fire"

If I had heard "Eldritch Fire" I would have gotten the intent, but I still agree with your post Matthew.

Pretty sure my group heard "magical fire" and we also thought our fire resistance was fine. The DM did not correct us as we were talking about resisting the fire damage. So we just carried on our way taking little damage. This was a Nightmare run at around 8:14 PM on Saturday.

I agree that the more Tokens can’t be used in the Dungeon Rooms then why bother getting them?

I used to carry tons of Tokens that I thought I could be creative with. Now I just carry the stuff equipped on my character. I got tired of being told: “No. You can’t do that with X Token.”

Huh, thats odd. As soon as the DM said 'magical fire', i was elated that my magic damage reduction worked. And also assumed fire reduction worked, no more questions to clarify, the DM said 'magic' and 'fire', if the DR wasnt supposed to work, DM shouldnt use those words. Period.

As for not designing rooms with damage that cant be resisted; i agree. It can be extremely frustrating to equip DR tokens and find out that not only do they not work, but choosing different items wouldnt work either.

My responses to ideas:

1. Please NO! Do not simply increase the damage and assume the party will resist the difference. It is frustrating enough when certain events assume things like supreme ring, please dont do that in the dungeon too.

2. I do like the spliting damage types...if it is needed.

3. Eldritch should be very rare. If you dont want damage to be resisted, stop making tokens that do that...AND let us exchange our URs for new ones that boost our stats instead.

...so, yeah, what i actually think needs to be done is let damage reduction work. Let it work more often, make it valuable, make players really have to decide if they want to reduce damage they take OR deal more damahe to the monster.

It would be nice for all non-eldritch, non-puzzle damage to have two labels;
1. Melee, missile, magic, or special (breath weapon, beholder eye rays, etc)
2. Fire, cold, shock, darkrift, holy, force, poison, etc

EVERY damage should use one type from each list. To keep DR from being too powerful OR useless, the dungeon should use a good variety of these types, very few repeats. So, dont have a whole dungeon of magical cold. Instead, have one monster use magic cold, then a missile poison, then a special darkrift breath attack, and lastly a melee with force damage.

Sure, players can equip to a point of not being hurt by some monsters, but they will do so at the cost of boosting other stats.

Lastly, regardless of what you think of my other ideas, please stop using words to describe damage that arent the type of that damage. If you say it is some kind of 'fire' damage, fire DR will work. If you dont want fire DR to work, do not say the word 'fire' when describing the damage/attack. Also, this means that 'eldritch' should always be used alone, without any other descriptors; other words just make it confusing, 'eldritch' says unpreventable. ...also, please dont use eldritch except maybe once every other year.

Agree with comments. I think as soon as I heard fire I assume my fire resistance kicked in. Maybe I just didn’t do that run on nighrmare.

I did E3 twice at Gencon (Friday 5:24 and Saturday 3:38), both on Nightmare. The first time, the damage was described as "Fire," and I was pleased with myself for guessing that equipping Flameguard Greaves was a good idea in the "Infernal Redoubt" dungeon, and would help mitigate some of the damage. On my second run, the damage was described as "Eldritch Fire." The DM said that it wasn't reducible via things like ioun stones or greaves, but it could be healed via a lamp (as a standard action or after combat if we beat the monster). I found that confusing, as well as frustrating. I thought Eldritch damage was just Eldritch. And as some others have said, what's the point of equipping damage reducing tokens if they don't work against "special" fire or cold damage?

I was having a conversation with my wife who is more fed up with "non-conventional" damage types than I am.

She told me that if the damage is not an official TD damage type, she ignores it. In recent memory it includes:

• Moist
• Steam
• Necrotic
• Trample
• Magical fire (treated as spell and fire)
• Slashing (treated as melee)

As far as the magical fire is concerned, I interpreted the damage as "fire spell damage" and figured the "unmitigated magical fire damage" was a misinterpretation from the DM and discarded it. I also heard similar explanations about reasoning centered around the ability to use the FoP: Salamander or Lamp of the Efreeti, but I figured the idea of designing an encounter focused on the exclusive use of out-of-print rares was ridiculous.

To clarify, here is what an AC (director?) told me:

On Non-Lethal, Normal, and Hardcore it was fire and could be resisted.

On nightmare it was magical fire and couldn't be, and this was intentional.

I didn't discuss explicitly with the DM or anyone else whether the lamps would work - I assumed that if Bead Firehold didn't work the Lamp wouldn't work either.